The name Kilfarboy derives from the Irish, with "Cill" indicating a church or monastic cell, a naming pattern that reaches back to the early Christian period in Ireland, when such foundations were often modest enclosures associated with a local saint or community of monks. That original dedication and the precise character of the ruins, whether a simple nave, a more elaborate medieval structure, or something reduced almost entirely to earthwork, remain details not presently available in the public record.

The parish of Kilfarboy sits in the Miltown Malbay area of west Clare, a part of the county with a notably dense concentration of early ecclesiastical sites. The broader landscape here carries the marks of repeated settlement, from early medieval enclosures to later Gaelic and post-Norman layering. Churches bearing the "Kil" prefix in their placename are frequently among the oldest sites in any Irish parish, sometimes predating the formal Anglo-Norman reorganisation of ecclesiastical territories in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Whether the Kilfarboy church belongs to that early stratum or represents a later medieval building within an older sacred enclosure is precisely the kind of question that awaits fuller documentation.